Almost every music streaming service on the market offers a radio feature, allowing you to create an automatically generated playlist around a song or artist you love. For the most part, however, those features don’t offer a lot of flexibility. You pick a single song or artist and the platform does the rest – as is the case with Spotify and Apple Music.
Google has begun rolling out a redesigned radio feature on YouTube Music the company claims provides users with a lot more control over their listening experience. Among the new features the refreshed experience includes is the ability to pick up to 30 artists when creating your own radio station. You can also decide how frequently those artists repeat and apply filters that change the mood of the resulting playlist. For instance, a few of the selections include “chill,” “downbeat” and “pump-up.”
It’s also possible to adjust the parameters you set after creating a station by tapping the “Tune” option that appears at the bottom of the interface once you’re listening to your new playlist. Naturally, you can save the station to revisit it later. Once the new experience is available on your device, you will see a prompt in the main interface that says “Create a radio.” As with many of Google’s rollouts, it may take some time before you see the feature on your client.
On its own, it’s fair to say the feature won’t be enough to convince some to ditch Spotify and Apple Music for YouTube Music, but if you’re among the 50 million subscribers Google says has access to the service, it may prompt you to use it more frequently or convert the free trial you got with your phone into a paid subscription.
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